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How then can advisors leverage the content Twitter delivers throughout the day, put it into context, aggregate it and deliver it to their clients in their own voice?

To say news of the U.S. downgrade has thrown the U.S. stock market into a tailspin is an understatement to say the least. To help them through these troubled times, investors are turning to their advisors for up to the minute news and advice. Where are advisors turning to get the information their clients are demanding? The answer may surprise you.

Increasingly, advisors are using Twitter for its up-to-the-tweet breaking news, and its versatility as a terrific networking and marketing platform. Other than the fact that it's free, what else compels advisors to use Twitter as part of their marketing strategy?

Here are a few reasons:

51 percent of Twitter users follow companies, brands, or products on social networks

5 percent of Americans were aware of Twitter in 2008 compared to 87 percent in 2010

Twitter’s search engine processes over 600 million queries every day

82 percent of companies using Twitter tweet company news in an average week, with an average of 27 tweets per week

The infatuation with Twitter's speed and ease of use may have caused some to overlook the vast power of Twitter’s content.
But today’s wired world is about content. The very audience advisors are targeting has a voracious appetite for content.

Social media content in and of itself is content and is extremely valuable. Social media content put into context and aggregated creates a competitive advantage that can power your brand to the next level and beyond.

But advisors are missing that to be active, to be heard, to be found and to be a thought leader doesn’t mean you have to create all the content by yourself – that’s where Twitter comes in.

How then can advisors leverage the content Twitter delivers throughout the day, put it into context, aggregate it and deliver it to their clients in their own voice?

The first step is to get a copy of Twitter’s new guide “Twitter for Newsrooms." The guide is a little bit obvious for anyone who uses Twitter on a daily basis. But the fact that Twitter has launched an official guide for journalists is indicative of the impact of social media on the news.

Next, you will need to identify a social media archiving solution provider. Your provider decision should take into consideration their ability to provide monitoring, market intelligence and research, in addition to satisfying compliance needs.
At a minimum, your provider should:

Allow you to customize your Twitter experience with groups, columns, saved searches and automatic updates on topics and people you are following. Being able to track what others are saying about you, give updates via tweeting, and to share photos, videos and links from a single dashboard is a must for convenience and efficiency.

Allow for RSS integration for archiving blogs, blog comments and a wide number of other social and Web destinations used for monitoring and archiving.

Allow you to leverage discovery tools such as StumbleUpon. Discovery tools allow you to find fresh content and to share your content that you might not find on your own.

Provide a dashboard allowing you to easily and conveniently monitor and launch your communications.

These features allow advisors to conveniently listen, converse, share your voice, understand your customers, gather feedback and engage a large audience in a more personal manner. By selecting a provider that is able to offer content management workflow for Web and social content, analytics to measure results, while preserving compliance, satisfies the need for data aggregation and enhances your return on investment.

In markets like the one we are experiencing now, clients aren’t demanding their advisors have all the answers. However, they do expect their advisors to provide them a source of credible information from which they can make informed and intelligent decisions. More and more advisors are finding those 140-character tweets provide them the ammunition they need.